Entries tagged “IMAP”

I’ve been mostly happy with the mail setup i documented some time
ago,
but i never was fully convinced by offlineimap, it was often slow, sometime
blocking, and felt a bit unreliable. Last time i went out looking for a
replacement, there wasn’t much of them around, and although i had read a bit
about mbsync, it didn’t seem nearly as
commonly used as offlineimap, the voices praising it were few.

Discussing my issues with offlineimap at work the other day, i discovered that
a co-worker had been using mbsync for his setup for years, and seemed to have
zero issues with it. So i decided to give it a whirl.

I based my configuration on information found in the arch linux
wiki which is often a very nice
source of information, even for users of other distributions, especially for
users of uncommonly used, nerdy, pieces of software. I directly pointed my
configuration to my existing Maildir, and after a few runs (the first one
seemed to chock a bit on the number of mails to sync), it went well and have
been running very reliably since.

I’m not running it into a crontab yet, i’m just keeping a terminal next to the mutt one, with a simple script like:

while true;
do; sleep 10m
mbsync -a; date
done

Which allows me to see when was the last sync, and what actually happens during
the sync. I must say i’m really happy i don’t have to go forward and code my
own IMAP synchronization tool, that would probably have been a very pointy
experience.